Quintiles to acquire electronic health record consulting firm

Quintiles Transnational Holdings Inc. has reached an agreement to acquire a Texas-based company that helps hospitals and doctors implement electronic health records and to analyze their health data.

The Durham company is expected to close on the acquisition of Encore Health Resources later this quarter. Encore has more than 300 employees – the majority of them consultants -- around the country.

Phil Bridges, a spokesman for Quintiles, said that over time, Encore’s expertise in electronic health records will be useful in informing observational research and clinical trials. Quintiles’ major business is in the contract management of clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies.

In the acquisition announcement, Quintiles said that electronic health records have become more important as “biopharmaceutical customers, payers and providers focus on measuring outcomes based on real-world performance.”

“We are an organization that understands the real-world data and how to get to it, and how to capture it, and how to be able to get it back out of the (electronic health record) systems, and gain meaningful insights from it,” Encore’s CEO Dana Sellers said in an interview Monday.

Sellers said the more-than-five-year-old company’s biggest business is in helping health care providers implement electronic health record systems. But she said its fastest growing business is in analytics, which involves helping other providers to understand and get insights and value from data.

Sellers said she thinks Quintiles can help accelerate the company’s vision of getting value from health data as the Durham company employs hundreds of people with medical degrees as well as biostatisticians. She also said that more and more in the world of clinical trials management, the push is toward real-world data.

“Encore has significant EHR expertise, strong relationships with many large U.S. provider networks and academic medical centers as well as experienced consultants, proven tools, and methodologies,” Quintiles CEO Tom Pike said in Monday’s announcement. “It will be a key strategic addition for our business that will extend our services suite and allow us to work with Encore to strengthen its provider-focused solutions.”

When the deal is final, Encore will join Quintiles’ Integrated Healthcare Services segment, which includes the company’s contract pharmaceutical sales force.

While financial details about the acquisition were not disclosed, Quintiles’ release said the acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on the company’s earnings per share this year.

Shares in Quintiles Transnational Holdings Inc. were up 33 cents after the market’s close to $47.87. The company, which employs 29,000 people globally, recently brought more than $1 billion in service revenues in the first quarter, for the second consecutive quarter it’s topped that mark.